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A former co-worker once told me “If you want to learn Debian, install Debian. If you want to learn Fedora, install Fedora. If you want to learn Linux, install Slackware.” The philosophy behind Slackware is to keep the system as UNIX-like as possible. There’s not a lot of automatic configuration and you won’t find many bells and whistles, but you’d be hard set to find a more stable and mature distribution. In fact, Slackware is one of the few distros still in existence from Linux’s early days, right along with Debian, SuSE, and Red Hat. Because of this decision to keep things as UNIX-like as possible, Slackware has a reputation for being somewhat difficult to install and confusing to use. While this has been true for a long time, there have been some great improvements in the past few releases, and now seems like a great time to run a guide on this often misunderstood distribution.

There are so many reasons why having a Linux distribution on a USB drive can come in handy. From having a “rescue” OS on your keyring to being able to install a new distribution on your EeePC, a “thumb drive” Linux has many uses. But getting Linux onto a USB drive can’t be simple. Right? Wrong. There is a tool, UNetbootin, that makes installing Linux on a USB drive simple. UNetbootin can be used on either Linux or Windows. In this article, we’ll be illustrating it for Both.

An office suite is a collection of related software for business and other uses. The software is distributed together in a single package, with a consistent graphical interface, and with strong interaction between the different components.

The Wine development release 1.1.37 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

Let's face it. Even though open source conferences, conventions, and projects have seen an increase in the number of female participants, there's a strikingly male majority in the world of free software. While the greater free software community, media outlets, conferences and projects are finding diverse ways to draw women to open source, the GNOME Foundation's Outreach is built on a familiar framework. The approach? Think Google Summer of Code -- complete with internships, mentors, and sponsors -- with an emphasis on team contributions rather than stand-alone projects.

The Release Candidate for opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM Version 1.4 is now available for download from sourceforge.net

T-Mobile launched an Eric Clapton-backed Fender Limited Edition of its Android-based MyTouch 3G phone. Meanwhile, China-based Hisense announced an HS-E90 Android phone, Motorola is launching an Android app store in China, and Taiwan's Gigabyte is rumored to be releasing an Android handset in Russia, say reports.

In December the U.S. White House set guidelines for an open and transparent administration. The Open Source for America (OSFA) organization is now following up with tips for a governmental move to free software.

LXer Feature: 23-Jan-2010

A new test version of Youtube offers HTML 5 video support, meaning watching videos without Adobe Flash, but only when browsing with Chrome or Safari. While this might seem strange at first, and might sound like Google is abandoning its Firefox users, things are a little bit more complicated.

Google has confirmed that its upcoming lightweight, browser-centric Chrome OS operating system will include a built-in media player. In an interview with ArsTechnica, Matthew Papakipos, the engineering director for the Chrome OS project, says that the developers are currently working on "integrating a whole media player into Chrome and into Chrome OS".

The second alpha of Ubuntu 10.06 boasts 15-second boot-time, says an industry report. Meanwhile, the Ubuntu project posted a controversial survey about which proprietary apps might be considered for inclusion with the distro, and Canonical announced a support plan for IBM's Ubuntu/Lotus "Smart Work" cloud distribution.

It is very hard to manage thousands of users manually, so a user-provisioning tool becomes very important in our process. In this article by Flavio E.Goncalves, we are going to see two of these tools—SerMyAdmin and OpenSIPS Control Panel (OpenSIPS-CP). SerMyAdmin is more focused on the administration of the users, while OpenSIPS-CP is excellent for monitoring and provisioning parameters to the system.

LinuxTag is the most important place for Linux and open source software in Europe. Last year, LinuxTag had over ten thousand attendees, and over 300 speakers. This year, the 16th LinuxTag will be June 9-12, 2010 at the Berlin Fairgrounds in Germany. LinuxTag seeks exciting and suitable proposals for presentations in the conference tracks.

YouTube and Vimeo is kicking Adobe's Flash to the curb in favor of the sharp new HTML5. Both YouTube and Vimeo have announced that they are launching HTML5-based players on their video streaming sites, thus booting out the long-standing champ of multimedia delivery, Adobe Flash. With recent security issues plaguing Adobe products, it's no surprise that media giants such as YouTube are jumping ship. What makes HTML5 special is that the new Web standard doesn't require Adobe's software to stream content to viewers.

Shortly after the European Union approved Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems (and MySQL), I interviewed Ingres President and CEO Roger Burkhardt about his views on the Oracle-MySQL combo. Here are his thoughts.

Firefox 3.6 was released yesterday, after over six months since the last major release, version 3.5. Firefox 3.6 ships with versions for over 70 languages, support for Personas, an add-on allowing you to change the appearance of the tab bar and choose from thousands of themes, improvements to the open video support (like the fullscreen mode), improved JavaScript performance and start-up time, support for the new DOM and HTML5 specs.

The San Francisco Committee on Information Technology has published a new software evaluation policy that requires departments of the city government to consider open source software solutions alongside proprietary commercial offerings.

Obviously, I've spent a good amount of time trying to think of a suitable intro to this column. But I couldn't find anything appropriate to express my disgust and disappointment at Ubuntu's missed opportunity. So I'll state it plainly – Ubuntu, you got us this far and then, just when it mattered, you blew it for all of us. Unlike many, I'm not ranting about Karmic Koala's technical glitches. In fact, it's still one of the best options for the desktop, and it's technically superior to the new Windows OS that its release coincided with. But this is where it hurts. For the first time ever, the mainstream tech press mentioned an upcoming Linux release in a Windows preview article. And what did Ubuntu do to capitalise on this new-found exposure? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Except for those operating systems that are still gaining their foothold (Haiku, Syllable, ReactOS), it seems as though we are becoming increasingly platform independent.

What's happened to innovation for KDE and GNOME? Would the developers prefer that we use the command line?